EXCERPTS

It
is easy to forget that American colleges and universities derive
their
greatness not by echoing the conventional views of society, carrying
the partisan banner of governments, or giving aid and comfort
to
purveyors of prejudices. Rather, they do so by protecting the
freedom of professors and students to read widely and explore
topics in
all their complexity, to think critically and debate issues where
there are grounds for reasonable disagreement, and to imagine
and
express new ideas and new worlds without fear of reprisal or retribution.... By
demonstrating our steadfast commitment to protecting the freedom
of faculty members and students to engage in vigorous discourse
across the political spectrum without government interference,
we
can prevent the threat of a chill from becoming a devastating frost.

At the level
of higher education, the primacy of political education points away
from a singular conception of the university — as an ivory
tower, a multiversity, or a community of learning — toward
a moral pluralistic conception, which accommodates the associational
freedoms of a wide variety of universities, all of which uphold
academic freedom. Universities serve democracy both as sanctuaries
of nonrepression and as associational communities. They also serve
as gatekeepers of valuable social offices, and as such they should
give priority to the democratic principle of nondiscrimination over
efficiency in their admissions procedures.

Political education
prepares citizens to participate in consciously reproducing their
society, and conscious social reproduction is the ideal not only
of democratic education but also of democratic politics.

The controversy
over preferential hiring also cannot be dismissed, as it is
by the
most vehement critics, by saying that preferential hiring violates
the right of the most meritorious to the jobs that they merit.
Even in an ideal society without a history of racial, gender, or
class discrimination, preferential hiring would not violate anyone’s
right to a particular job. This is because the principle of
nondiscrimination, which is commonly accepted by critics and
advocates of preferential
hiring alike, grants no one a right to a particular job. It grants
all of us a right to equal consideration for those jobs for
which we are basically qualified. In an ideal society, it
would be unjust to pass over individuals for jobs on the basis
of something other
than their inadequate qualifications (or unavoidable bad luck).

I can only
summarize here what many excellent empirical studies of this
society
confirm. Ongoing racial discrimination beginning early in the
life of most black Americans compounded by grossly unequal and
often
inadequate income, wealth, educational opportunity, health care,
housing, parental and peer support — all of which are plausibly
attributable (in some significant part) to a history of racial
injustice
— combine to deny many black Americans a fair chance to compete
for a wide range of highly valued job opportunities in our society.
This observation by itself does not justify — or even recommend
— preferential treatment for blacks, but it should lead us
to criticize any color blind perspective that collapses the fundamental
principle of fairness into a commitment to color blindness. In
so doing, a color blind perspective fails to leave room for according
moral relevance to the fact that we do not yet live in a land of
fair equality of opportunity for all American citizens — let
alone in a world of fair equality of opportunity for all persons,
regardless of their nationality.

To begin to
show why deliberative democracy is different from other theories,
and how it can more readily accommodate moral conflict, we need
to distinguish between first- and second-order theories of democracy.
First-order theories seek to resolve moral disagreement by rejecting
alternative theories or principles with which they conflict. They
measure their success by whether they resolve the conflict consistently
on their own terms.... Second-order theories deal with moral
disagreement by accommodating first-order theories that conflict
with one another. They measure their success by the extent to
which they can justify both their proposed resolutions and the
moral disagreements
that remain, to all who must live with them. They are called second-order
because they are about other theories, in the sense that
they refer to first-order principles without affirming or denying
their ultimate validity. They can be held consistently without
rejecting any of a wide range of moral principles expressed by
first-order
theorists.

Deliberative
democracy is also a second-order theory, and therefore (like some
procedural theories) makes room for continuing moral conflict that
first-order theories seek to eliminate. But it avoids the difficulties
of procedural theories by explicitly acknowledging the substantive
conflicts underlying procedural theories, and by explicitly affirming
substantive principles in its own theory. A full theory of deliberative
democracy includes both substantive and procedural principles, denies
that either is morally neutral, and judges both from a second-order
perspective.